At antique Hackensack clock tower, springing ahead looks like going back in time

It’s Friday — roughly 2:21 p.m., but by whose watch? — with the daylight saving changeover 36 hours in the future. And Lengyel, one of the area’s last bona fide tower clock specialists, is busy adjusting one of the area’s last public clocks that needs to be reset by hand.

“BONG!” sounds the chime of the great tower clock at Johnson Free Public Library in Hackensack. It’s somewhat off its normal schedule, and no wonder. In a tiny room on the other side of the huge clock face — reached by an elevator and an improbably steep staircase — Lengyel is at the mechanism. “One of the hammers is busted,” he said. “We’ll have to come back to that.”

Now he’s adjusting the time, twisting the drive shaft from the main mechanism so that it matches up with the little numbers on a reference timing gear. Outside, the hands on the clock face are turning, too. He checks his watch. Correct? “It had better be,” he said.

In fact, the time will be one hour off for the next day and a half — until daylight saving time returns at 2 a.m. Sunday.

Nor is this unusual. Other towns, faced with the problem of a weekend clock-adjustment by Monday-through-Friday employees, have equally creative schemes. Paterson will be changing the big City Hall clock on Monday. Ridgewood, too, will be resetting its big clock on Ridgewood Avenue, near Van Neste Square, after the fact. “If we do it on Friday, then it’s wrong for two days,” said Jim O’Connell, supervisor of the village’s parking traffic and signaling division. “If we do it Monday, it’s only wrong for a day.”

The Johnson Library clock, 36 inaccurate hours and all, is a beauty: raised iron Roman numerals, set in a crenellated stone tower topped by a weathered copper-green cupola. But the interior mechanism, seldom seen by outsiders, is gorgeous, too: gears, ratchets, chains, shafts, set in a chassis about the size of a cooking stove. “E. Howard & Company, Boston, Mass.,” reads the plate. “It’s cast iron, very brittle,” Lengyel said. “You have to be careful with this stuff.”

Public clocks like this were once a source of civic pride. Banks, jewelry stores and railroad stations erected them to dramatize their own reliability. Businessmen set their watches to them. People met “under the clock.” And if a movie comedian wanted to turn convention on its ear, what could be more subversive than to dangle from a big public clock, as Harold Lloyd did in “Safety Last!” in 1923?

Today, when everyone gets satellite-accurate time through dozens of personal gadgets, the public clock doesn’t matter as much. The big clocks themselves — the ones that are still left — have mostly been electrified, automated.

When Lengyel, 69, a Hungarian native and former Edgewater resident (he now lives in Sussex County), first began servicing local clocks around 1979, there were maybe 50 or 60 clocks he had to change twice a year, when daylight saving time came and went. Now, of the more than 1,000 clocks he services year-round, only the clock in the 112-year-old Johnson Library tower has to be reset manually. It, too, has been electrified — but without an automatic reset to keep it accurate.

That’s just fine with Lengyel — who’ll take the swing of a pendulum over the dull silence of an electric motor any time. “You ever stand in front of a grandfather clock?” he said. “You have the tick on the one side and the tock on the other. To me, that’s music.”

An electronics technician by trade (he also services intercoms, PA systems and nurse call systems), he’s had a special fondness for clocks ever since he found one in a junkyard at around age 13, fixed it up and brought it to his home in Edgewater.

“It was a mantel clock with a chime in it,” he recalled. “It got to the point where I had to shut it off. My mother couldn’t stand it.”

Lengyel, on the other hand, couldn’t get enough of the bings and bongs — and still can’t.

On Friday, he was already looking forward to his next job: a return visit to the Johnson Library tower, to fix that busted hammer he noticed earlier. It sounds one of the bells on the clock tower’s four-note “Westminster chimes.” He nodded to a ladder, leading up to a trap door in the ceiling.

“That goes up to the bell tower,” he said. “That’s where I have to go next time.”